SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 4, 1977 -- He was a "rock-em, sock-em cop not overly carried away with playing spook," according to a friend who knew him at the time. But the diaries and personal papers of the Central Intelligence Agency operative who ran "safe houses" in San Francisco and New York in which drug-addicted prostitutes gave LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting visitors tell a different story.

The diaries were kept by Col. George H. White, Alias Morgan Hall, a colorful federal narcotics agent and CIA "consultant" who died two years ago. They reveal new details, including names and dates, about the safe house project, dubbed "Operation Midnight Climax," which was part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program in the 1950s and 1960s to manipulate human behavior. Curiously, White's widow donated his papers to the Electronics Museum at Foothill Junior College, a two-year school set amidst the rolling Los Altes hills 40 miles south of San Francisco. The papers are a rare find for anyone interested in the espionage business and show White dashing about the world, busting up narcotics rings in South America, Texas and San Francisco's Chinatown.

They also provide documentary evidence that White met to discuss drugs and safe houses with such CIA luminaries as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Division and the man who ran MK-ULTRA, and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, a CIA chemist who worked with LSD. Other high-ranking CIA officials mentioned prominently include Jame Angleton, C. P. Cabell and Stanley Lovell. Gottlieb and Lashbrook have been subpoenaed to testify Sept. 20 before a Senate subcommittee investigating the MK-ULTRA project.

"Gottlieb proposes I be CIA consultant and I agree." White wrote in his diary June 9, 1952. A year later it was confirmed: "CIA - got final clearance and sign contract as 'consultant' - met Gottlieb . . . lunch Napoleon's - met Anslinger."

Harry C. Anslinger was White's boss and the No. 1 man in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. It could not be learned from the diaries whether Anslinger knew that one of his top narcotics agents also was working for the CIA, in fact, was tape-recording and observing men to whom prostitutes gave drugs after picking them up in bars. But a July 20, 1953, entry by White strongly suggests Anslinger knew: "Arrive Wash. - confer Anslinger and Gottlieb re CIA reimbursement for 3 men's services."

These entries fit in with a 1963 internal report by then-CIA Inspector General Lyman B. Kirkpatrick about the MK-ULTRA project. That report, made public in 1975, discussed the safe house operations and the connection to the Bureau of Narcotics:

"TSD (Technical Services Division) entered into an informal arrangement with certain cleared and witting individuals in the Bureau of Narcotics in 1955 which provided for the release of MK-ULTRA materials for such testing as those individuals deemed desirable and feasible."

The report added that while "covert testing" was being transferred to the bureau, its chief would disclaim any knowledge of it.

"The effectiveness of the substances on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign," Kirkpatrick wrote, "is of great significance, and testing has been performed on a variety of individuals within these categories."

In 1953, White rented a house at 81 Bedford St. in New York City's Greenwich Village under the name of Morgan Hall, the same one he used several years later to set up the Telegraph Hill apartment at 225 Chestnut St. in San Francisco.

His diaries show that Gottlieb and Lashbrook met him at the Bedford Street apartment. A June 8, 1953, entry said: "Gottlieb brings $4,123.27 for 'Hall' - Deposit $3,400." A Sept. 16 entry added: "Lashbrook at 81 Bedford - Owen Winkle and LSD surprise - can wash."

In 1955, White moved the safe house to San Francisco, and he took over as regional head of tha Bueau of Narcotics. Apparently, the Chestnut Street duplex also was used by the bureau to lure narcotics dealers and then arrest them. In 1956, White and narcotics agent Ira C. Feldman, who posed as an East Cost mobster, arrested seven San. Franciscans as part of a heroin ring.

Leo Jones, a friend of White, owned the company that installed the bugging equipment at the apartment. The equipment included four DD4 microphones disguised as wall outlets. These were hooked up to two model F-301 tape recorders monitored by agents in a "listening post" adjacent to the apartment. Jones also sold White a "portable toilet for observation post."

It was an L-shaped apartment with a beautiful view of San Francisco Bay, and White, who kept pitchers of chilled martinis in the refrigerator, also had photos of manacled women being tortured and whipped.

"We were contacted by George White," Jones said in an interview. "It was a combined project of the CIA and Bureau of Narcotics . . . It was always referred to as the pad, never the apartment, and was modeled after Playboy magazine, 1955 . . . I heard about prostitutes. Feldman had acquired three or four to set himself up with cover."

White's diaries indicate that Gottlieb continued to visit, flying out from Washington several times a year at least until 1961. Another visitor was John Gittinger, a CIA psychologist who testified last month before Senate investigative committees that he met with "Morgan Hall" on numerous occasions to interview prostitutes about their drug and sex habits.

White retired from the bureau in 1965 and became the fire marshal at Stinson Beach, a resort area in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Among his papers is a Sept. 30, 1970, letter to Dr. Harvey Powelson, then chief of the department of psychiatry at the University of California at Berkeley. He told Powelson that he had worked for a "rather obscure department of the government (that would like to remain obscure)."

That obscure department. White wrote, "was then interested in obtaining some factual information and data on the use and effect of various hallucinogens, including marijuana tetrahydrocannabinol and the then brandnew LSD. Tests were made under both clinical and nonclinical conditions on both witting and unwitting subjects."

White said in the letter to Powelson he was interested enough to try the drugs himself. "So far as I was concerned, 'clear thinking' was nonexistent while under the influence of any of these drugs," he wrote. "I did feel at times that I was having a 'mind-expanding experience,' but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session." He said the tests were observed by psychiatrists, psychologists and pharmacologists.

Not all of White's diary entries involved clandestine meetings with narcoties or CIA agents - or addicts and prostitutes, for that matter. He duly recorded that Eisenhower and Nixon won in 1952 and that the Brooklyn Dodgers took the National League baseball pennant in 1955.

And when his pet bird died, it hurt, he wrote. "Poor little bastard just couldn't make it," a 1952 entry says. "Tried hard. I don't know if I'll ever get another bird or pet. It's tough on everyone when they die."

White, born in 1906, started out as an itinerant journalist, working for newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles before becoming a narcotics agent in the early 1930s. During World War II he was in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. where he acquired the rank of lieutenant colonel and made future contacts. After that, he went back to his narcotics work, interrupting it in the early 1950s to become an investigator for the Senate committee headed by Sen. Estes Kefauver that looked into organized crime.

One interesting detail links White to the 1953 case of Dr. Frank Olson, an Army employee who was working with the CIA at Camp Detrick, Md. Olson had been given LSD without being told, and 10 days later jumped to his death from the 10th floor of a New York City hotel. At the time, Lashbrook was in the room with Olson, who had gone to New York to be treated by Dr. Harrold Abramson, a psychiatrist who had worked for the CIA.According to CIA documents, Lashbrook called Gottlieb, his supervisor at the time, and then went to the police station to identify the body. He was asked to "turn out his pockets."

He had written on a piece of white paper the initials "G. W." and "M.H." Lashbrook was asked to identify whose initials they were, but expunged CIA documents said he could not for security reasons. However, knowledgeable sources who have seen the CIA documents said Lashbrook identified "G. W." as George White and "M. H." as Morgan Hall, White's undercover name. The piece of paper also contained the address 81 Bedford St. which White's diary shows to be the New York safe house.

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vinyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"
—George Hunter White

In the early 195O’s the US chased the world’s LSD supply as just the first step in a debauched CIA program code-named MK-ULTRA. In an exclusive interview, Ike Feldman, one of the operation's kingpins, talks to Richard Stratton about deadly viruses, spy hookers, and bad trips.

The meeting was set for noon at a suitably anonymous bastion of corporate America, a sprawling Marriott Hotel and convention center on Long Island. Driving out of the city, I was tense and paranoid. For one thing, I was leaving Manhattan without permission from my parole officer, What was I going to tell him? "I want to travel to Long Island to interview a former narcotics agent who worked undercover for the CIA dosing people with LSD." My parole officer would have ordered a urine test on the spot.
Then there was the fact that previous run-ins with drug cops had usually resulted in criminal prosecutions. I spent most of the '80s in prison for smuggling marijuana. How would this ex-agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (BBN), forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) take to a retired outlaw writing a story about M K-ULTRA, the CIA's highly secretive mind-control and drug-testing program?

Ira "Ike" Feldman is the only person still alive who worked directly under the legendary George Hunter White in MK-ULTRA. The program began in 1953 amid growing fear of the Soviet Union's potential for developing alternative weaponry. The atomic bomb was a sinister threat, but more terrifying still were possible Soviet assaults on the mind and body from within — through drugs and disease. In an attempt to preempt foreign attacks and even wage its own assaults, the CIA funded a group of renegade agents to experiment with ways to derail a human being.

For years, Feldman had ducked reporters. He agreed to meet with me only after a private detective, a former New York cop who also did time for drugs. put in a good word. There was no guarantee Feldman would talk.

The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. The study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for the CIA.”

I recognized Feldman immediately when he waddled into the lobby of the Marriott. I had heard he was short, five three, and I’d read how George White used to dress him in a pinstriped zoot suit, blue suede shoes, a Bursalino hat with a turned-up brim, and a phony diamond ring, then send him onto the streets of San Francisco to pose as an East Coast heroin dealer. Now in his 70s, Feldman still looks and talks like Edward G. Robinson playing gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo.

Feldman leveled a cold, lizard-like gaze on me when we sat down for lunch. He wielded a fat unlit cigar like a baton, pulled out a wad of bills that could have gagged a drug dealer, slipped a 20 to the waitress and told her to take good care of us.

"What's this about?" Feldman demanded. "Who the fuck are you?"

I explained I was a writer researching George White. White, a world-class drinker known to polish off a bottle of gin at a sitting and get up and walk away, died of liver disease in 1975, two years before MK-ULTRA was first made public.

"Why do you want to write about White? I suppose it's this LSD shit."

No, I said, not just the LSD. George White deserved to have his story told..

"White was a son of a bitch," Feldman said. "But he was a great cop. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew."

Again he gazed stonily at me. "Lots of writers asked me to tell my story. Why should I talk to you?"

I decided to come clean. "I used to be part of your world," I answered. "I did eight years for the Feds because I refused to rat when I got busted for pot."

Feldman stared at me for a long time. "I know," he said. "I checked you out. That's why I'm here. Now get out your pencil." He waved for the waitress and palmed her a 50 to cover the tab.

"The LSD," Feldman began, "that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That's what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA."

For my next Interview with Feldman, I rented a day room at the Marriott and brought along a tape recorder. Feldman tottered in, pulled a small footballshaped clear plastic ampule out of his pocket and plunked it on the table. It was filled with pure Sandoz LSD-25. He also showed me a gun disguised as a fountain pen which could shoot a cartridge of nerve gas. "Some of the stuff George White and I tested," he explained.

"It all began because the CIA knew the Russians had this LSD shit and they were afraid the KGB was using it to brainwash agents," Feldman told me. "They were worried they might dump it in the water supply and drive everybody wacky. They wanted us to find out if we could actually use it as a truth serum."

Actually, it all began with a mistake. In 1951, Allen Dulles, later appointed director of Central Intelligence, received a report from military sources that the Russians had bought 50 million doses of a new drug from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. A follow-up memo stated that Sandoz had an additional ten kilos - about 100 million doses - of the drug, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25), available for sale on the open market

Dulles was alarmed. From the beginning, LSD was lauded by military and intelligence scientists working on chemical warfare compounds and mind-control experiments as the most potent mind-altering substance known to man. "Infinitesimally small amounts of LSD can completely destroy the sanity of a human being for considerable periods of time (or possibly permanently)," stated an October 1953 CIA memo. In the wrong hands, 100 million doses would be enough to sabotage a whole nation's mental equilibrium.

Dulles convened a high-level committee of CIA and Pentagon officials who agreed the agency should buy the entire Sandoz LSD supply lest the KGB acquire it first. Two agents were dispatched to Switzerland with a black bag containing $240,000.

In fact, Sandoz had produced only about 40 grams of LSD in the ten years since its psychoactive features were first discovered by Albert Hofmann. According to a 1975 CIA document, the U.S. Military attaché in Switzerland had miscalculated by a factor of one million in his CIA reports because he did not know the difference between a milligram (1 /1,000 of a gram) and a kilogram (1,000 grams).

Nevertheless, a deal was struck. The CIA would purchase all of Sandoz's potential output of LSD. (Later, when the Eli Lilly Company of Indianapolis perfected a process to synthesize LSD, agency officials insisted on a similar agreement.) An internal CIA memo to Dulles declared the agency would have access to “tonnage quantities.” All that remained was for agency heads to figure out what to do with it.

"The objectives were behavior control, behavior anomaly -production, and counter-measures for opposition application of similar substances," states a heavily redacted CIA document on MK-ULTRA released under a 1977 Freedom of Information Act request, The chill winds of the Cold War were howling across the land. Dulles was convinced that, as he told Princeton University's National Alumni Conference, Russian and Chinese Communists had secretly developed "brain perversion techniques ... so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them."

Pentagon strategists began to envision a day when battles would be fought on psychic terrain in wars without conventional weaponry. The terrifying specter of a secret army of “Manchurian Candidates,” outwardly normal operatives programmed to carry out political assassinations, was paraded before a gullible and easily manipulated public.

Ike Feldman remembers that time well. A Brooklyn boy, he was drafted into the Army in 1941. Army tests showed he had an unusual facility for language, so he was enrolled in a special school in Germany where he learned fluent Russian, By the end of the war, Feldman was a lieutenant colonel with a background in Military Intelligence. The Army sent him to another language school, this time in Monterey, California, where he added Mandarin Chinese:to his repertoire.

While with Military Intelligence in Europe, Feldman first heard of George White. “White was with the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA]. I heard stories about him. Donovan [William “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the OSS] loved White. White supposedly killed some Japanese spy with his bare hands while he was on assignment in Calcutta. He used to keep a picture of the bloody corpse on the wall in his office."

In the early '50s, after a stint in Korea working for the CIA under Army auspices, Feldman decided he’d had enough of military life. He settled in California. "I always wanted chickens," Feldman recalled, "so I bought a chicken ranch. In the meantime, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do with chickens.

"Before long, I got a call—this time from White," Feldman continued. "We understand you're back in the States,” he says.“I want you to come in to the Bureau of Narcotics." This was '54 to '55, White was District Supervisor [of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics] in San Francisco. I went in. I go to room 144 of the Federal Building, and this is the first time I met George White. He was a big, powerful man with a completely bald head. Not tall, but big. Fat. He shaved his head and had the most beautiful blue eyes you've ever seen. "Ike," he says, "we want you as an agent. We know you've been a hell of an agent with Intelligence. The CIA knows it. You speak all these languages. We want you to work as an under cover agent in San Francisco."

What Feldman didn't know at the time was that George White was still working for the CIA. White's particular area of expertise was the testing of drugs on unwitting human guinea pigs. During the war, one of White’s projects for the OSS was the quest for a "truth drug," a serum that could be administered to prisoners of war or captured spies during interrogations. After trying and rejecting several substances the OSS scientists settled on a highly concentrated liquid extract of cannabis indica, a particularly potent strain of marijuana. Never one to shrink from the call of duty, White first tried the drug on himself. He downed a full vial of the clear, viscous liquid and soon passed out without revealing any secrets.

Meanwhile, at the CIA's Technical Services Staff (TSS), the department specializing in unconventional weaponry such as poisons, biological warfare, psychoactive substances, and mind control, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was searching for a candidate to head MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb, a club-footed scientist who overcame a pronounced stutter in his rise to head the TSS, had discovered White's name while perusing old OSS files on the Truth Drug Experiments. White's credentials were impeccable: A former crime reporter on the West Coast before he joined the narcotics bureau, White had soon become one of the top international undercover agents under Harry Anslinger, the grandfather of America's war on drugs.

After meeting with Gottlieb, White noted his initiation into the world of psychedelics in his diary: "Gottlieb proposes I be CIA consultant and I agree."

Moonlighting for the CIA, with funds disbursed by Gottlieb, White rented two adjoining apartment safe houses at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village. Using the alias Morgan Hall, he constructed an elaborate alter-identity as a seaman and artist in the Jack London mode. By night, CIA spy Morgan Hall metamorphosed into a drug-eating denizen of the bohemian coffeehouse scene. With a head full of acid and gin, White prowled downtown clubs and bars. He struck up conversations with strangers, then lured them back to the pad where he served drinks spiked with Sandoz’s finest.

"Gloria gets the horrors ... Janet sky high," White dutifully recorded in his diary. In another entry, he proudly noted, "Lashbrook at 81 Bedford Street—Owen Winkle and the LSD surprise—can wash." In recognition of the often bizarre behavior brought on by the drug, White assigned LSD the codename "Stormy."

Secret agent man: Allen Dulles (top), the former director of the CIA, who authorized the purchase of Sandoz LSD; George White (middle) examines opium pipes as he takes over as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston in 1951; Harry Anslinger (bottom), circa 1954, then head of FBN.

According to an agency memo, the CIA feared KGB agents might employ psychedelics “to produce anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity.” In an effort to school “enlightened operatives” for that eventuality, Dulles and Gottlieb instructed high-ranking agency personnel, including Gottlieb’s entire staff at TSS, to take LSD themselves and administer it to their colleagues.

"There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation for the reason that we felt that a firsthand knowledge of the subjective effects of these drugs [was] important to those of us who were involved in the program," Gottlieb explained at a Senate Subcommittee hearing years later. In truth, CIA spooks and scientists alike were tripping their brains out. "I didn't want to leave it," one CIA agent said of his first LSD trip "I felt I would be going back to a place where I wouldn't be able to hold on to this kind of beauty."

But as covert LSD experiments proliferated, things down at CIA headquarters began to get out of hand. "LSD favors the prepared mind," wrote Dr. Oscar Janiger, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and early LSD devotee. Non-drug factors such as set and setting—a person's mental state going into the experience and the surroundings in which the drug is taken-—can make all the difference in reactions to a dose of LSD.

Frank Olson was a civilian biochemist working for the Army Chemical Corps' Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. In another sub-project of MK-ULTRA code-named MK-NAOMI, the CIA had bankrolled SOD to produce and maintain vicious mutant germ strains capable of killing or incapacitating would-be victims. Olson's specialty at Fort Detrick was delivering deadly diseases in sprays and aerosol emulsions.

Just before Thanksgiving in 1953, at a CIA retreat for a conference on biological warfare, Gottlieb slipped Olson a huge dose of LSD in an after-dinner liqueur. When Gottlieb revealed to the uproarious group that he'd laced the Cointreau, Olson suffered a psychotic snap. "You're all a bunch of thespians!" Olson shouted at his fellow acid trippers, then spent a long night wandering around babbling to himself.

Back at Fort Detrick, Olson lapsed in and out of depression, began to have grave misgivings about his work, and believed the agency was out to get him Ten days later, he crashed through the tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York and plummeted to his death on the sidewalk below.

"White had been testing the stuff in New York when that guy Olson went out the window and died," Feldman said. "I don't know if he jumped or he was pushed. They say he jumped. Anyway, that's when they shut down the New York operation and moved it to San Francisco." The Olson affair was successfully covered up by the CIA for over 20 years. White, who had been instrumental in the cover-up, was promoted to district supervisor.

"I don't know if [Olson] jumped or he was pushed. They say he jumped..."

Unfazed by the suicide of their colleague, the CIA's acid enthusiasts were, in fact, more convinced of the value of their experiments. They would now focus on LSD as a potent new agent for offensive unconven-tional warfare. The drug-testing program resumed in the Bay Area under the cryptonyrn Operation Mid-night Climax. It was then that White hired Feldman.

Posing as Joe Capone, junk dealer and pimp, Feldman infiltrated the seamy North Beach criminal demimonde. "I always wanted to be a gangster," Feldman told me. "So I was good at it. Before long, I had half a dozen girls working for me. One day, White calls me into his office. 'Ike,' he says, 'you've been doing one hell of a job as an undercover man. Now I'm gonna give you another assignment. We want you to test these mind-bending drugs.' I said, 'Why the hell do you want to test mind-bending drugs?' He said, 'Have you ever heard of The Manchurian Candidate?' I know about The Manchurian Candidate. In fact, I read the book. 'Well,' White said, 'that's why we have to test these drugs, to find out if they can be used to brainwash people.' He says, 'If we can find out just how good this stuff works, you'll be doing a great deal for your country.'"

These days, Feldman takes offense at how his work has been characterized by former cops who knew him. "I was no pimp," Feldman insisted. Yet he freely admitted that his role in Midnight Climax was to supply whores. "These cunts all thought I was a racketeer," Feldman explained. He paid girls $50 to $100 a night to lure johns to a safe house apartment that White had set up on Telegraph Hill with funds provided by the CIA. Unsuspecting clients were served cocktails laced with powerful doses of LSD and other concoctions the CIA sent out to be tested.

"As George White once told me, 'Ike, your best information outside comes from the whores and the junkies. If you treat a whore nice, she'll treat you nice. If you treat a junkie nice, he'll treat you nice.' But sometimes, when people had information, there was only one way you could get it, If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer. If it was a guy, you took his cock and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people."

The "pad," as White called the CIA safe house, resembled a playboy's lair, circa 1955. The walls were covered with Toulouse-Lautrec posters of French cancan dancers. In the cabinets were sex toys and photos of manacled women in black fishnet stockings and studded leather halters. White outfitted the place with elaborate bugging equipment, including four microphones disguised as electrical outlets that were connected to tape recorders hidden behind a false wall. While Feldman's hookers served mind-altering cocktails and frolicked with the johns, White sat on a portable toilet behind the two-way mirror, sipping martinis, watching the experiments, and scribbling notes for his reports to the CIA.

"We tested this stuff they call the Sextender," Feldman went on. "There was this Russian ship in the harbor. I had a couple of my girls pick up these Russian sailors and bring 'em back to the pad. White wanted to know all kinds of crap, but they weren't talking. So we had the girls slip 'em this sex drug. It gets your dick up like a rat. Stays up for two hours. These guys went crazy. They fucked these poor girls until they couldn't walk straight. The girls were complaining they couldn't take any more screwing. But White found out what he wanted to know. Now this drug, what they call the Sextender, I understand it's being sold to guys who can't get a hard-on."

One such drug, called papavarine, is injected directly into the penis with a half-inch needle containing about two raindrops’ worth of the medicine. "I tell [the men] to thrust it in like a bullfighter finishing off the bull," said a San Antonio urologist in a recent report on the new therapies used to treat male impotence. "Dangers include injecting too much drug, so that an erection can last dangerously long and kill penile tissue." The potions are not administered orally, as they were by the CIA, because the drug must affect only the penis and not the rest of the body. Drug companies are now working on a cream that can be rubbed directly into the penis before intercourse. Feldman claims we have the CIA to thank for these medical breakthroughs.

“White always wanted to try everything himself,” Feldman remembered. “Whatever drugs they sent out, it didn't matter, he wanted to see how they worked on him before he tried them on anyone else. He always said he never felt a goddamn thing. He thought it was all bullshit. White drank so much booze, he couldn’t feel his fucking cock.

“This thing” — Feldman held up the fountain pen gas gun — “the boys in Washington sent it out and told us to test the gas. White says to me,’C’mon, Ike. Let’s go outside. I’ll shoot you with it, then you shoot me.” ‘Fuck that,’I said.‘You ain’t gonna shoot me with that crap.’ So we went outside and I shot George White with the gas. He coughed, his face turned red, his eyes started watering. He was choking. Turned out, that stuffwas the prototype for Mace.”

I asked Feldman if he’d ever met Sidney Gottlieb, the elusive scientist who was the brains behind MK-ULTRA. “Several times Sidney Gottlieb came out,” Feldman assured me. “I met Gottlieb at the pad, and at White's office. White used to send me to the air-port to pick up Sidney and this other wacko, John Gittinger, the psychologist. Sidney was a nice guy. He was a fuckin’ nut. They were all nuts. I says, ‘You’re a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, like me. What are you doing with these crazy cocksuckers? He had this black bag with him. He says, ‘This is my bag of dirty tricks.’ He had all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a drive over to Muir Woods out by Stinson Beach. Sidney says, ‘Stop the car.’ He pulls out a dart gun and shoots this big eucalyptus tree with a dart. Then he tells me, Come back in two days and check this tree.’ So we go back in two days, the tree was completely dead. Not a leaf left on it. Now that was the forerunner of Agent Orange.

“I went back and I saw White, and he says to me, ‘What do you think of Sidney?’ I said, ‘I think he's a fuckin’ nut.’ White says,'Well, he may be a nut, but this is the program. This is what we do.’ White thought they were all assholes. He said, ‘These guys are running our Intelligence?’ but they sent George $2,000 a month for the pad, and as long as they paid the bills, we went along with the program.” Gottlieb, who now lives in Virginia, refused to be interviewed for this article.

“Another time, I come back to the pad and the whole joint is littered with these pipe cleaners,” Feldman went on. “I said, ‘Who’s smokin' a pipe?’ Gittinger, one of those CIA nuts, was there with two of my girls. He had ’am explaining all these different sex acts, the different positions they knew for humping. Now he has them making these little figurines out of the pipe cleaners-men and women screwing in all these different positions. He was taking pictures of the figurines and writing a history of each one. These pipe cleaner histories were sent back to Washington.”

A stated goal of Project MK-ULTRA was to determine “if an individual can be trained to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily” while under the influence of various mind-control techniques, and then have no memory of the event later. Feldman told me that in the early ’60s, after the MK-ULTRA program had been around for over a decade, he was summoned to George White’s office. White and CIA director Allen Dulles were there.

"They wanted George to arrange to hit Fidel Castro," Feldman said. "They were gonna soak his cigars with LSD and drive him crazy. George called me in because I had this whore, one of my whores was this Cuban girl and we were gonna send her down to see Castro with a box of LSD-soaked cigars."

Dick Russell, author of a recent book on the Kennedy assassination titled The Man Who Knew Too Much,uncovers new evidence to support the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was a product of MK-ULTRA. One of the CIA’s overseas locations for LSD and mindcontrol experiments was Atsugi Naval Air base in Japan where Oswald served as a Marine radar technician. Russell says that after his book was published, a former CIA counter-intelligence expert called him and said Oswald had been “viewed by the CIA as fitting the psychological profile of someone they were looking for in their MK-ULTRA program,” and that he had been mind-conditioned to defect to the USSR.

Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, while working as a horse trainer at the Santa Anita race track near Los Angeles, was introduced to hypnosis and the occult by a fellow groom with shadowy connections. Sirhan has always maintained he has no memory of the night he shot Kennedy,

One of the CIA’s mob contacts long suspected of involvement in John Kennedy's assassination was the Las Vegas capo mafioso John Roselli. Roselli had risen to prominence in the Mob by taking over the Annenberg-Ragen wire service at Santa Anita, where Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, sold a handicapper’s tip sheet. Ike Feldman told me Roselli was one of White’s many informants.

"On more than one occasion, White sent me to the airport to pick up John Roselli and bring him to the office,” said Feldman. Roselli was originally from Chicago, where White had served as District Supervisor of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1945 through 1947. Following a big opium smuggling bust in 1947, Jack Ruby was picked up and hauled in for interrogation, then later let off the hook by none other than White. Federal Bureau of Narcotics files indicate Jack Ruby was yet another of White’s legion stool pigeons.

The connections between MK-mind-control experiments, the proliferation of the drug culture, Mob/CIA assassination plots, and the emergence of new, lethal viruses go on and on. Fort Detrick in Maryland, where Frank Olson worked experimenting with viral strains (such as the deadly microbes Sidney Gottlieb personally carried to Africa in an aborted attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba), was recently the locale of a near disaster involving an outbreak of a newly emerged virus. The event was chronicled in a lengthy article published in the New Yorker.

Though the New Yorker writer did not make the connection between Fort Detrick, SOD, Frank Olson, and MK-NAOMI, he told of a number of monkeys who all died of a highly infectious virus known as Ebola that first appeared in 55 African villages in 1976, killing nine out of ten of its victims. Some epidemiologists believe AIDS originated in Africa. Feldman claimed the CIA used Africa as a staging ground to test germ warfare because “no one gave a goddamn about any of this crap over there.”

The MK-ULTRA program, the largest domestic operation ever mounted by the CIA, continued well into the ’70s. According to Feldman and other CIA experts, it is still continuing today under an alphabet soup of different cryptonyms. Indeed, one ex-agent told me it would be foolish to think that a program as fruitful as MK-ULTRA would be discontinued. When the agency comes under scrutiny, it simply changes the name of the program and continues unabated.

The public first learned of MK-ULTRA in 1977, with the disclosure of thousands of classified documents and CIA testimony before a Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy. Ike Feldman was subpoenaed and appeared on a panel of witnesses, but the senators failed to ask him a single question. Sidney Gottlieb, complaining of a heart condition, testified at a special semi-public session. He delivered a prepared statement and admitted to having destroyed perhaps one set of files. Another set was turned over to Senate investigators. The full extent of the CIA's activities under the rubric of MK-ULTRA may never be known.

George White retired from the Narcotics Bureau in 1965. The last ten years of his life, he lived in Stinson Beach, California, where, known as Colonel White, he went on the wagon for a few years and became chief of the volunteer fire department. Local residents remember him once turning in four kids for smoking pot, and in another incident, spraying a preacher and his congregation with water at a beach picnic. He was also known to terrorize his wealthier neighbors by driving his jeep across their lawns. After White's death, his widow donated his papers, including diaries, to an electronic surveillance museum. As information on MK-ULTRA entered the public domain, people who had known White only in his official FBN capacity were stunned to learn of his undercover role as Morgan Hall.

Ike Feldman, kept alive by a pacemaker, lives with his wife in a quiet suburban Long Island community where he tends his garden and oversees a number of business interests. According to George Belk, a former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York, Feldman quit the drug agency following a probe by the internal security division. “Feldman was the sort of guy who didn’t have too many scruples,” said Dan Casey, a retired FBN agent who worked with Feldman in San Francisco. “For him, the ends justified the means.” A DEA flack confirmed Feldman “resigned under a cloud” at a time when a number of agents came under suspicion for a variety of offenses, none having to do with secret drug-testing programs. Feldman asserts he still works for the CIA on a contract basis, mostly in the Far East and Korea.

On the day of our last interview, over lunch at a restaurant in Little Italy, Feldman told me the CIA had contacted him and asked him why he was talking to me.

"Fuck them," Feldman said. “I do what I want. I never signed any goddamn secrecy agreement.”

I asked him why he decided to talk with me. "There's too much bullshit in the world," Feldman said. "The world runs on bullshit.

"To make a long story short,” he said, using one of his favorite verbal segues, “I want the truth of this to be known so that people understand that what we did was good for the country.”

We ambled down the street to a Chinese grocer, where Feldman carried on a lengthy conversation with the owner in Chinese. A couple of young girls, tourists, wanted to have their picture taken with Feldman. “Are you a gangster?” they asked.

"No," Feldman replied with a wave of his cigar, "I'm a goddamn CIA agent."

As we walked on, I asked Feldman to explain how his work had been helpful to the country.

"I learned that most of this stuff was necessary for the United States,” he said, “and even though it may have hurt somebody in the beginning, in the long run it was important. As long as it did good for the country.”

Weird, twisted and bizarre tales about the San Francisco Bay Area are so numerous some merely make us yawn. But if any one story stands out for its sheer audacity, moral depravity and utter madness—this is it.

Years ago I came across a magazine article about something called Operation Midnight Climax. I knew it had to be a joke. The CIA, with the blessing and full cooperation of both the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the SFPD sets up and runs an LSD brothel in San Francisco for ten solid years? Who do you think you’re kidding? Still, I dutifully dug for corroborative facts concerning this alleged operation.

Turns out Operation Midnight Climax was no joke.

Its story is particularly timely in light of revelations concerning secret Bush Administration memos green-lighting CIA and Army Intelligence torture techniques supposedly designed to obtain information from “detainees” and “enemy combatants”.

Back in the 1950’s and ’60’s CIA experiments aimed at obtaining information and controlling human behavior gravitated to covertly dispensing numerous powerful psychotropic drugs. The CIA’s original charter prohibited it from engaging in any domestic operations. Yet many of these drugs were given to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil without their knowledge or consent. Anyone interested in this unseemly labyrinth can trot down to the the library or just google MK-ULTRA. If ever there was a reason to inform ourselves and hold political feet to the fire concerning our inalienable rights it’s MK-ULTRA. Its many programs had no external oversight and no accounting. For years fully 6% of the CIA’s entire budget went into MK-ULTRA programs that even Congress knew nothing about.

But I’m wandering from the story at hand, namely:

Operation Midnight Climax—a Bay Area baby born of MK-ULTRA.

He was a tough, fat, bald guy—a character right out of Hollywood central casting. Back in the early 1950’s an itinerant San Francisco journalist, former OSS operative and then Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent named George Hunter White, aka Morgan Hall, was assigned by his boss Harry Anslinger to team up with the CIA. Together they created Operation Midnight Climax. White’s assignment: explore and record how a new drug called LSD affects behavior when consumed by unsuspecting male johns in the company of drug addicted hookers. A great comedy scenario, if it weren’t so damn perverse.

By day George Hunter White continued to work the streets of San Francisco, ferreting out drug deals and drug dealers, setting them up and taking them down. By night he’d repair to the portable toilet his friend Leo Jones had provided him behind the two way mirror set into a wall of “the pad’s” Telegraph Hill bedroom. The L-shaped Chestnut Street duplex featured fantastic views of the San Francisco Bay. It was festooned with Toulouse-Lautrec posters, hidden microphones, tape recorders and a refrigerator stocked with pitchers of martinis. White was a notorious booze hound. He’d knock back a quart or more of gin nightly perched on the seat of his toilet scribbling notes on concurrent activities in the adjacent bedroom.

But dosing unwitting johns produced, well, wildly inconsistent results. White observed innumerable men behave in ways that suggested insanity. So White gave LSD the pet name “Stormy”. It fit. The “psychedelic revolution” was still years away. We can hardly imagine how the varied socio/ethnic/economic group of philanderers who wound up at “the pad” must have reacted when dosed. Most had never heard of, much less consumed any hallucinogenic substance before.

“White was a son of a bitch, but he was a great cop. He made that fruitcake Hoover look like Nancy Drew. The LSD, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Write this down. Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That’s what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA.”

George Hunter White continued operating his Telegraph Hill LSD brothel until 1965, when he retired from the service. He moved to Stinson Beach. Locals came to know him as Colonel White. He became the Stinson Beach Fire Marshall—and, after a few years on the wagon White died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1975.

Upon his death White’s widow gifted the Electronic Museum at Foothills Junior College, forty miles south of San Francisco, with his diaries. According to a Washington Post article dated September 5, 1977 these diaries:

“provide documentary evidence that White met to discuss drugs and safe houses with such CIA luminaries as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Division and the man who ran MK-ULTRA, and Dr. Robert V. Lashbrook, a CIA chemist who worked with LSD. Other high-ranking CIA officials mentioned prominently include James Angleton, C. P. Cabell and Stanley Lovell. Gottleib and Lashbrook have been subpoenaed to testify Sept. 20 (1977) before a Senate subcommittee investigating the MK-ULTRA project.”

Upon retirement George Hunter White wrote to Harry Anslinger, his old boss at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, reflecting on White’s many years of service:

“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

And so concludes yet another true San Francisco tale about your American taxpayer dollars working to protect you and yours.

Washington, October 31. Key members of the military regime controlling Haiti and blocking the return of its elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, were paid by the Central Intelligence Agency for information from the mid-1980's at least until the 1991 coup that forced Mr. Aristide from power, according to American officials.

As part of its normal intelligence-gathering operations, the C.I.A. cultivated, recruited and paid generals and politicians for information about everything from cocaine smuggling to political ferment in Haiti, they said.

Without naming names, a Government official familiar with the payments said that `several of the principal players in the present situation were compensated by the U.S. Government.' It was not clear when the payments ended or how much money they involved, although they were described as modest.

REPORTING CALLED ONE-SIDED

Supporters of Mr. Aristide said the payments proved that the C.I.A.'s primary sources of information in Haiti were Mr. Aristide's political enemies, and they criticized the agency's reporting on Haiti as one-sided.

Michael D. Barnes, a former member of Congress who is a spokesman for Mr. Aristide, said, 'Given what the C.I.A. has done in the past two weeks, namely the attempted character assassination of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that the C.I.A. had been working with his political enemies in Haiti for many years.

But Representative Robert G. Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat who serves on the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees and who confirmed the payments, defended the intelligence relationships as crucial to United States policy-makers in trying to gain an understanding of Haitian politics.

"The U.S. Government develops relationships with ambitious and bright young men at the beginning of their careers and often follows them through their public service,' he said. 'It includes people in sensitive positions in the current situation in Haiti."

A member of Congress familiar with the recruiting of sources of information within the Haitian Government said the information received was a mixed bag. "There are things we should have been getting for the money which we didn't get--for example, on the narcotics side," he said. Members of the current regime are suspected of receiving lucrative payments from drug traffickers to protect shipments of cocaine passing through Haitian airfields en route to the United States.

The C.I.A's activities in Haiti also included a covert operation, authorized by President Ronald Reagan and the National Security Council, which involved an aborted attempt to influence an election held in January 1988, the officials said.

Haiti was then under the control of a military ruler, Lieut. Gen. Henri Namphy, who assured the Reagan Administration that the elections would be free and fair. But the ballot was widely perceived as rigged by the military, and the campaign was marked by killings of civilians.

ARISTIDE URGED BOYCOTT

Mr. Aristide, who was not a candidate, had urged a boycott of the election. The operation undertaken by the C.I.A. aimed at seeing the election go forward, the officials said, but it also involved plans to slip campaign money to candidates. In a rare action, the payments were blocked by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the officials said. The attempt was first reported today by the Los Angeles Times.

In the 1980's, the United States undertook covert operations and military actions throughout the Caribbean and Latin America to support pro-United States and anti-Communist governments. Several prominent figures in the region were on the United States intelligence payroll during the decade.

The officials who described the payments to Haitian generals and politicians said they were not intended to install any one leader as the President of Haiti.

In 1990, in the first free election in 20th-century Haiti, Mr. Aristide won 67.5 percent of the vote in a field of 10 candidates. He was overthrown in a September 1991 coup. The military regime controlling Haiti has blocked his return--which was to have taken place Saturday under an accord negotiated by the Clinton Administration and signed by the military leaders last summer--with a widespread campaign of intimidation, violence and murder.

Supporters of Mr. Aristide say the C.I.A., which does not make policy but which can influence policy-makers through its reporting, has undermined the chances for his return. In recent briefings to Congress, Brian Latell, the C.I.A.'s chief analyst for Latin American affairs, has described Mr. Aristide as unstable and as having a history of mental problems.

In a 1992 report widely circulated in Washington, Mr. Latell described a meeting with Lieut. Gen. Raoul Cedras, Haiti's current military dictator, and praised him as one of "the most promising group of Haitian leaders to emerge since the Duvalier family dictatorship was overthrown in 1986."

The Clinton Administration, in turn, questioned the C.I.A.'s analyses and praised Father Aristide as a rational and reasonable man.

The officials who described the payments to generals and politicians in the current regime in exchange for information said they were a normal and necessary part of gathering intelligence in a foreign country.

"These relationships are crucial so that we can anticipate changes in volatile societies," Representative Torricelli said. He said the quality and quantity of information the C.I.A. provided on Haiti was generally praiseworthy.

But Robert Pastor, the chief National Security Officer for Latin American affairs from 1977 to 1981, said, "It appears that the portrait of Aristide is seriously flawed. Whether that is in part due to intelligence contacts that began as a result of these operations is a legitimate and important question that needs an answer."
_________________________________________________________________________________

Re "Key Haiti Leaders Said to Have Been in the C.I.A.'s Pay" (front page, Nov. 1): Repulsive is the word to describe the news we are getting on United States policy toward Haiti from the early 1980's until 1991.

I am struck by the disclosure of a covert operation authorized by President Ronald Reagan to influence the election in 1988, which resulted in the killing of hundreds of civilians; by the Central Intelligence Agency's recruiting and paying Haitian generals; by the character assassination of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fabricated by the same agency in 1990 to discredit him after the election he won by 67 percent of the vote, which gave the obvious approval signal to the military for his overthrow in the September 1991 coup.

No wonder Lieut. Gen. Raoul Cedras feels solid as a rock. Why should he surrender his power to someone whom United States policy makers have been destroying slowly and surely?

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13— The Central Intelligence Agency created an intelligence service in Haiti in the mid-1980's to fight the cocaine trade, but the unit evolved into an instrument of political terror whose officers at times engaged in drug trafficking, American and Haitian officials say.

American officials say the C.I.A. cut its ties to the Haitian organization shortly after the 1991 military coup against Haiti's first democratically elected President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Three former chiefs of the Haitian unit, the National Intelligence Service, known as S.I.N. from its initials in French, are now on the United States Treasury Department's list of Haitian officials whose assets in the United States were frozen this month because of their support for the military leaders blocking Father Aristide's return to power.

Analyses Are Criticized

The disclosure of the American role in creating the agency in 1986 comes amid increasing Congressional and public debate about the intelligence relationship between the United States and Haiti, the richest and poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Supporters of Father Aristide contend that the C.I.A. is undermining the chances for his return with analyses skewed by a misplaced trust in his military foes.

The agency paid key members of the junta now in power for political and military information up until the ouster of Father Aristide in 1991. A review of the C.I.A.'s activities in Haiti under the Reagan and Bush Administrations, based on documents and interviews with current and former officials, confirms that senior C.I.A. officers have long been deeply skeptical about the stability and politics of President Aristide, a leftist priest.

C.I.A. Help for Aristide

No evidence suggests that the C.I.A backed the coup or intentionally undermined President Aristide. In fact, the agency has acted to help him at times, for example through a program that is now training bodyguards to protect him should he return to Haiti from his exile in the United States.

Though much of the C.I.A.'s activity in Haiti remains secret, the emerging record reveals both failures and achievements in recent years.

Having created the Haitian intelligence service, the agency failed to insure that several million dollars spent training and equipping the service from 1986 to 1991 was actually used in the war on drugs. The unit produced little narcotics intelligence. Senior members committed acts of political terror against Aristide supporters, including interrogations that included torture, and threatened last year to kill the local chief of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.

On the other hand, United States officials said, one senior Haitian intelligence officer dissuaded soldiers from killing President Aristide during the 1991 coup. The C.I.A. also helped to save the lives of at least six Aristide supporters after the coup, evacuating them in a late-night rescue that involved the Navy's elite SEAL unit, officials said.

The C.I.A. also had a mixed track record in analyzing the fall of the 30-year Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986. The agency's analysts did not foresee the political violence that led to the collapse of elections in 1987 and the 1991 coup. But the analysts, contradicting the White House and the State Department, correctly predicted this year that the Haitian military would block President Aristide's scheduled return in October.

Members of the Congressional panels that oversee the C.I.A. say the agency's intelligence-gathering helped American policy makers bewildered by the political chaos that followed the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, including a series of military coups, and by Father Aristide's overwhelming victory in the December 1990 election.

Lawmaker Cites C.I.A.'s 'Bum Rap'

"The problems of Haiti are problems of policy, not intelligence," said Representative Dan Glickman, a Kansas Democrat who heads the House intelligence committee. "In some cases, intelligence gets a bum rap. From the interviews we've had with the agency, I don't get any feeling that our goal was to preserve military dictatorship in Haiti."

But Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who received extensive briefings from the agency, asserted last week that the C.I.A.'s view of Haiti was distorted by its ties to the Haitian military. "A lot of the information we're getting is from the very same people who in front of the world are brutally murdering people," Senator Dodd said.

One crucial source of information for American intelligence over the years, according to two Government officials, was Lieut. Gen. Raoul Cedras, who leads the Haitian armed forces. The officials said he provided the United States Government with reports critical of Father Aristide. The officials did not provide details from those reports. Nor did they say whether the general was paid.

In 1957, Francois Duvalier rose to power in Haiti. A corrupt dictator, he consolidated his power with the aid of a 10,000-member gang known as the Tontons Macoute.

Four years later, he was threatened by a C.I.A. covert operation in which the agency supplied arms to opponents plotting a coup, according to a 1975 Senate report. The plot failed.

On his death in 1971, Mr. Duvalier bequeathed his regime to his son, Jean-Claude, who received nearly $400 million in American economic aid until a popular revolt toppled his Government and he fled the country in February 1986.

Shortly afterward the C.I.A. created the Haitian intelligence service, S.I.N. The agency was staffed solely with officers of the Haitian Army, which was already widely perceived as an unprofessional force with a tendency toward corruption. The stated purpose was to stem the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of cocaine through Haiti, a crucial transit point for drug traffickers.

Money for Agency Despite Aid Curb

The United States would gain information on the Haitian military by creating the unit; the Haitian military would obtain money, training and equipment from the C.I.A.

In intelligence parlance, it was a "liaison" relationship. The C.I.A. does not normally report to Congress on such relationships, citing the sensitivity of other nations to disclosures of secrets. That reduces the role of Congressional oversight.

S.I.N. received $500,000 to $1 million a year in equipment, training and financial support from the C.I.A., United States and Haitian Government officials say. The money may have sent a mixed message, for Congress was withholding about $1.5 million in aid for the Haitian military regime at the same time.

By late 1988, the agency decided to "distance itself" from the intelligence service, a senior United States official said. But the ties continued until October 1991, just after the Sept. 30 coup against Father Aristide, he said.

A 1992 Drug Enforcement Administration document described S.I.N. in the present tense, as "a covert counternarcotics intelligence unit which often works in unison with the C.I.A. at post."

The Haitian intelligence service provided little information on drug trafficking and some of its members themselves became enmeshed in the drug trade, American officials said. A United States official who worked at the American Embassy in Haiti in 1991 and 1992 said he took a dim view of S.I.N.

"It was a military organization that distributed drugs in Haiti," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It never produced drug intelligence. The agency gave them money under counternarcotics and they used their training to do other things in the political arena."

U.S. Drug Official Gets Death Threat

"The money that was spent to train these guys in the counter-narcotics field boggled the mind -- half a million to a million a year," the official said. "They were turning it around and using it for political reasons, against whatever group they wanted to gather information on."

In September 1992, the work of United States drug-enforcement officials in Haiti led to the arrest of a S.I.N. officer on cocaine charges by the Haitian authorities.

A few days later, the Drug Enforcement Administration's chief in Haiti, Tony Greco, received a death threat on his private telephone line in the American Embassy. The caller identified himself as the arrested intelligence officer's superior, United States Government records show. Mr. Greco immediately left Haiti and has not returned.

Three former chiefs of the Haitian intelligence service -- Col. Ernst Prudhomme, Col. Diderot Sylvain and Col. Leopold Clerjeune -- were named by the United States Treasury Department in a Nov. 1 order for seizure of their assets in the United States. The document named 41 people "who seized power illegally," helped anti-Aristide forces or "contributed to the violence in Haiti."

Haitian officials say those S.I.N. officers persecuted Father Aristide's supporters and used their C.I.A. training to spy on them.

"They were heavily involved in spying on so-called subversive groups," an exiled member of the Aristide Government said. "They were doing nothing but political repression. Father Aristide was one of their targets. They targeted people who were for change."

Between 1 A.M. and 3 A.M. on Nov. 2, 1989, Colonel Prudhomme, who headed S.I.N. and held the title of chief of national security, led a brutal interrogation of Evans Paul, the Mayor of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, according to a sworn deposition taken from Mr. Paul in connection with a Federal lawsuit filed against senior Haitian military officers in 1991 in Miami.

Colonel Clerjeune also was present at the interrogation, which left Mr. Paul with five broken ribs and internal injuries, the Mayor said.

Mr. Paul, who opposed the military regime, was arrested by soldiers, beaten and taken to the police headquarters in Port-au-Prince, where the beatings continued, according to sworn statements. When Mr. Paul lost consciousness, he said, he was revived by soldiers holding a flame from a cigarette lighter under his nose.

"Prudhomme himself never touched me," Mr. Paul said in an interview from Haiti. "He played the role of the intellectual, the man who searched carefully for contradictions in your account -- the man who seemed to give direction to the whole enterprise. He wanted to present me to the world as a terrorist."

"He seemed to have so much information about my life, all the way from my childhood," the Mayor said. "It was if he had been following me step by step."

Last summer, Mr. Paul met his interrogator again. Colonel Prudhomme was part of the military delegation led by General Cedras at talks mediated by the United Nations in July at Governors Island in New York. The accord reached at that meeting called for General Cedras to step down by Oct. 15 and allow Mr. Aristide to return on Oct. 30. The military reneged on the accord.

But S.I.N. also produced a success story: Col. Alix P. Silva, who led the Haitian intelligence service from 1986 to 1988. In 1988, Colonel Silva compiled a list of 18 senior Haitian military officials whom he said should be cashiered for unprofessional conduct, corruption or cocaine trafficking. At the head of the list was Lieut. Gen. Prosper Avril, who seized power in a 1989 coup.

Forced into hiding when General Avril took power, Colonel Silva resurfaced after the 1990 election, in which Father Aristide won 67.5 percent of the vote in a field of 10 candidates. The colonel then served as Deputy Commander in Chief of the army under General Cedras, who betrayed President Aristide by ousting him in September 1991.

It was Colonel Silva, current and former American officials say, who persuaded Haitian soldiers not to shoot Father Aristide on the night of the coup. Although briefly a member of the Cedras junta, Colonel Silva was among a handful of Aristide supporters who were evacuated shortly after the coup in a clandestine flight from Haiti that was coordinated by the C.I.A. and a team of Navy commandos, the officials said.

Though derring-do may be part of the C.I.A.'s image, the agency's most important task is helping American leaders understand what goes on in the world. Its intelligence analysts, not its spies, hold sway in Washington.

The agency's leading analyst of Latin American affairs, Brian Latell, traveled to Port-au-Prince in July 1992 and recorded his trip in a three-page note that he later shared with members of Congressional intelligence committees. He met with General Cedras, who he said impressed him as "a conscientious military leader who genuinely wishes to minimize his role in politics."

That impression, Father Aristide's supporters say, contributed to the faith placed in General Cedras by United States policy makers, a faith broken when the general abrogated the Governor's Island accord.

Mr. Latell also reported that he "saw no evidence of oppressive rule" in Haiti.

Rights Report Tells A Different Story

"I do not wish to minimize the role the military plays in intimidating, and occasionally terrorizing real and suspected opponents," the analyst said, but "there is no systematic or frequent lethal violence aimed at civilians."

That conflicts with a State Department report for the same year, which said, "Haitians suffered frequent human rights abuses throughout 1992, including extra-judicial killings by security forces, disappearances, beatings and other mistreatment of detainees and prisoners, arbitrary arrests and detention and executive interference with the judicial process."

Mr. Glickman, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, defended Mr. Latell's work and said that no institutional bias afflicted the agency's reporting on Haiti.

But he said he had questions about "this whole counternarcotics involvement of the agency" and what good, if any, it achieved in Haiti.

Photo: Backers of Haiti's ousted President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, say the C.I.A. is undermining the chances for his return with analyses skewed by misplaced trust in his military foes. As a United Nations fuel embargo intended to pressure the army continues, the price of sugar cane has risen because of the scarcity of fuel needed to transport it. A worker carted sugar cane in Port-au-Prince. (Associated Press) (pg. 12)
________________________________________________________________________________

A Central Intelligence Agency anti-drug program in Venezuela shipped a ton of nearly pure cocaine to the United States in 1990, Government officials said today.

No criminal charges have been brought in the matter, which the officials said appeared to have been a serious accident rather than an intentional conspiracy. But officials say the cocaine wound up being sold on the streets in the United States.

One C.I.A. officer has resigned, a second has been disciplined and a Federal grand jury in Miami is investigating.

The agency, made aware of a "60 Minutes" investigation of the matter scheduled for broadcast on Sunday, issued a statement today calling the affair "a most regrettable incident" involving "instances of poor judgment and management on the part of several C.I.A. officers."

The case involves the same program under which the agency created a Haitian intelligence service whose officers became involved in drug trafficking and acts of political terror. Its exposure comes amid growing Congressional skepticism about the role of the C.I.A. in the war on drugs.

In the mid-1980's, under orders from President Ronald Reagan, the agency began to set up anti-drug programs in the major cocaine-producing and trafficking capitals of Central and South America. In Venezuela it worked with the country's National Guard, a paramilitary force that controls the highways and borders.

Government officials said that the joint C.I.A.-Venezuelan force was headed by Gen. Ramon Guillen Davila, and that the ranking C.I.A. officer was Mark McFarlin, who had worked with anti-guerrilla forces in El Salvador in the 1980's. The mission was to infiltrate the Colombian gangs that ship cocaine to the United States.

In December 1989, officials of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency said, Mr. McFarlin and the C.I.A. chief of station in Venezuela, Jim Campbell, met with the drug agency's attache in Venezuela, Annabelle Grimm, to discuss a proposal to allow hundreds of pounds of cocaine to be shipped to the United States through Venezuela in an operation intended to win the confidence of the Colombian traffickers.

Unlike so-called "controlled shipments" that take place in criminal investigations, shipments that end with arrests and the confiscation of the drugs, these were to be "uncontrolled shipments," officials of the drug agency said. The cocaine would enter the United States without being seized, so as to allay all suspicion. The idea was to gather as much intelligence as possible on members of the drug gangs. Drug Agency Balked

The drug agency refused to take part in the operation and said it should be called off. In a transcript of the "60 Minutes" broadcast supplied to The New York Times, Ms. Grimm said Mr. McFarlin of the C.I.A. and General Guillen had gone ahead anyway.

"I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000 kilos came in, funded by U.S. taxpayer money," Ms. Grimm said, according to the transcript. "I found that particularly appalling."

D.E.A. officers and other Government officials gave this account of the cocaine shipments and subsequent investigations into their origins:

The C.I.A.-Venezuelan force accumulated more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine delivered to its undercover agents by Colombian traffickers and stored the cocaine in a truck at the intelligence agency's counter-narcotics center in Caracas. Most of the cocaine was flown to the United States in a series of shipments during 1990. DrugCocaine Seizureed at Miami Airport

In late 1990, United States Customs Service officials seized a shipment of nearly 1,000 pounds at Miami's international airport and discovered that it had been shipped by members of the Venezuelan National Guard. Investigators from the drug agency interviewed a Venezuelan undercover agent working with the C.I.A.'s counter-narcotics center, who told them that the shipments had been approved by the United States Government.

The investigators from the drug agency, unaware that the intelligence agency had any role in the affair, first set about trying to eliminate their own personnel as suspects. They found that a female drug enforcement officer in Caracas had a close relationship with Mr. McFarlin. Using information she had obtained from him, the drug agency then focused its attention on the C.I.A. officer and his colleague, General Guillen.

In June 1991 the United States Attorney in Miami sent a memorandum to the Justice Department proposing the indictment of the general.

"The fly in the ointment is that the dope was delivered to the United States," a senior Drug Enforcement Agency official said in an interview today. "If you're part of a drug shipment and you have knowledge that it is going to the U.S., whether or not you ever entered the U.S., you're culpable."

That month, Melvin Levitsky, then the chief State Department official overseeing international narcotics matters, met with officers of the Justice Department, the C.I.A. and the D.E.A. and explained that if the Justice Department brought an indictment against General Guillen, the United States might have to cut off assistance to Venezuela, causing major diplomatic problems. General Is Granted Immunity

The general was not indicted. In exchange for his cooperation, he was granted immunity from having his own words used against him. But the general apparently said nothing implicating the Central Intelligence Agency.

But in 1992 the intelligence agency's own inspector general completed a report on the affair and submitted it to the Senate Intelligence Committee. That report remains secret, although aspects of the affair have been widely reported in Venezuelan newspapers.

Former agency officers familiar with the report say it found no indication that anyone from the C.I.A. had profited from the affair. Mr. McFarlin has resigned from the agency, and a second officer was disciplined. No criminal charges are pending, although General Guillen has been subpoenaed to appear before a Federal grand jury in Miami, the C.I.A. said in a statement today.

The investigation crippled the agency's counter-narcotics center in Venezuela, but similar centers continue to operate in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and other cocaine-trafficking countries, Government officials said. Such programs fall under the banner of "liaison relationships" with foreign intelligence agencies, and rarely if ever does the C.I.A. willingly report on these relationships to Congress.

In an interview last week, Representative Dan Glickman, the Kansas Democrat who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said the subject of C.I.A. anti-drug activities needed closer scrutiny by the agency's Congressional overseers.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Recent news item: The Justice Department is investigating allegations that officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials - despite protests by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the organization responsible for enforcing U.S. drug laws.

That is a huge amount of cocaine. But it was hardly a first for the CIA. The agency has never been above using individuals or organizations with known links to drug trafficking if it thought they could help it further its national security mission.

Let us put the Venezuelan case in context: To protect its "assets" abroad, the CIA has ensured that the DEA's concerns outside the country were subordinated to its own. Until recently, no DEA country attaché overseas was allowed to initiate an investigation into a suspected drug trafficker or attempt to recruit an informant without clearance from the local CIA station chief. DEA country attachés are required to employ the standard State Department cipher, and all their transmissions are made available to the CIA station chief. The CIA also has access to all DEA investigative reports, and informants' and targets' identities when DEA activities outside the United States were involved.

In Costa Rica, when the war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government was at its peak and cocaine was beginning to pour into the United States, the DEA attaché wanted to place cameras at clandestine airstrips from which he suspected drugs were being flown to the United States. The CIA resident gave him a list of airstrips on which he was not to place cameras. They were the strips into which the CIA was flying arms for the contras. Some were also strips from which the DEA agent suspected drugs were being flown to the United States.

Shortly after the kidnapping and brutal murder of the DEA's Enrique Camarena in Mexico, Francis Mullen, the DEA administrator, was taken by the CIA station chief in Mexico City to Mexico's director of federal security, a man who, the station chief confided, was a CIA asset. The gentleman, Mr. Mullen told me, denied any knowledge of the affair. He was lying. A DEA investigation revealed that he had been connected - a man on the CIA payroll, no less - to the murder of a U.S. federal agent.

CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to the Korean War. In 1949, two of Chiang Kai-shek's defeated generals, Li Wen Huan and Tuan Shi Wen, marched their Third and Fifth Route armies, with families and livestock, across the mountains to northern Burma. Once installed, the peasant soldiers began cultivating the crop they knew best, the opium poppy.

When China entered the Korean War, the CIA had a desperate need for intelligence on that nation. The agency turned to the warlord generals, who agreed to slip some soldiers back into China. In return, the agency offered arms. Officially, the arms were intended to equip the warlords for a return to China. In fact, the Chinese wanted them to repel any attack by the Burmese.

Soon intelligence began to flow to Washington from the area, which became known as the Golden Triangle. So, too, did heroin, en route to Southeast Asia and often to the United States.

If the agency never condoned the traffic, it never tried to stop it, either. The CIA did, however, lobby the Eisenhower administration to prevent the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the DEA's predecessor, from establishing monitoring posts in the area to study the traffic. Today, the Golden Triangle accounts for about half the heroin in circulation in the world.

During the Vietnam War, operations in Laos were largely a CIA responsibility. The agency's surrogate there was a Laotian general, Vang Pao, who commanded Military Region 2 in northern Laos. He enlisted 30,000 Hmong tribesmen in the service of the CIA.

These tribesmen continued to grow, as they had for generations, the opium poppy. Before long, someone - there were unproven allegations that it was a Mafia family from Florida - had established a heroin refining lab in Region Two. The lab's production was soon being ferried out on the planes of the CIA's front airline, Air America. A pair of BNDD agents tried to seize an Air America.

A pair of BNDD agents tried to seize an Air America DC-3 loaded with heroin packed into boxes of Tide soap powder. At the CIA's behest, they were ordered to release the plane and drop the inquiry.

The CIA was made officially aware of Manuel Antonio Noriega's involvement in the drug traffic in 1972, when Mr. Noriega was chief of intelligence of the Panama National Guard, and a promising CIA asset. The BNDD found evidence that Mr. Noriega was taking payoffs for allowing heroin to flow from Spain, through Panama City airport, and on to the United States. That information was part of a lengthy file on Mr. Noriega compiled by Jack Ingersoll, then chief of the BNDD.

Mr. Ingersoll was aware of Mr. Noriega's ties to the CIA, as was President Richard Nixon. When Mr. Nixon ordered Mr. Ingersoll to Panama to warn the country's military dictator, General Omar Torrijos, about the activities of Mr. Noriega and General Torrijos's brother Moises, Mr. Ingersoll hoped that law enforcement was finally "beginning to get the upper hand in its ongoing struggle with the CIA." He was wrong. The Watergate break-in occurred shortly after his visit. Mr. Nixon needed CIA support; his enthusiasm for the drug war evaporated. Mr. Ingersoll's successors at the newly formed DEA - Peter Bensinger, Francis Mullen and John Lawn - all told me they never saw his file, although they had asked to see everything the DEA had on Mr. Noriega. The material has disappeared.

Shortly after General Torrijos's death in a mysterious airplane crash, Mr. Noriega, with CIA assistance, took command of the Panama National Guard.

No one in the Reagan administration was prepared to do anything about the Noriega drug connection. As Norman Bailley, a National Security Council staff member at the time, told me, "The CIA and the Pentagon were resolutely opposed to acting on that knowledge, because they were a hell of a lot more worried about trying to keep Panama on our side with reference to Nicaragua than they were about drugs." Nowhere, however, was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan during the Afghan War. As its principal conduit for arms and money to the Afghan guerrillas, the agency chose the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence Bureau. The ISI in turn steered the CIA's support toward Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamic fundamentalist. Mr. Hekmatyar received almost half of the agency's financial support during the war, and his fighters were valiant and effective. But many of his commanders were also major heroin traffickers.

As it had in Laos, the heroin traffic blossomed in the shadows of a CIA-sustained guerrilla war. Soon the trucks that delivered arms to the guerrillas in Afghanistan were coming back down the Khyber Pass full of heroin.

The conflict and its aftermath have given the world another Golden Triangle: the Golden Crescent, sweeping through Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of the former Soviet Union. Many of those involved in the drug traffic are men who were once armed, trained and financed by the CIA.

The writer's latest book, "Black Eagles," deals with the CIA, cocaine traffic and Central America in the mid-'80s. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.
_______________________________________________________________________________

The Central Intelligence Agency has suspended some operations abroad, told many clandestine operatives to lie low and begun a microscopic review of some of the most difficult intelligence cases of the last decade as a consequence of the case against Aldrich H. Ames, the Central Intelligence Agency officer accused of spying for Moscow, Government officials said last week.

The arrest of Mr. Ames, a former Soviet counterintelligence branch chief, has forced the agency to reopen its files on hundreds of cases covering drug operations, a duplicitous defector and even the death of one of its own officers, they said. Years of Backtracking

In scores of overseas stations and in its own labyrinthine corridors, the C.I.A. is "walking the cat back," spy argot for the difficult business of understanding a disaster and dealing with its aftermath. Government officials said the agency must take numerous steps, with these among them:

* Reviewing the loyalties of scores of paid agents recruited from Russia and Eastern Europe.

* Renewing an inquiry into the killing of one of its officers.

* Contemplating the possibility that Mr. Ames sold information on drug operations from his most recent posting, at the agency's Counternarcotics Center.

Though "a thorough damage assessment" promised by the agency's director, R. James Woolsey, has barely begun, it is already clear that the damage is extensive. Assessing its depth may take years. The Russian intelligence service, which is said to have paid Mr. Ames hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for his information, is unlikely to be much help.

Mr. Ames was arrested on Feb. 20 is accused of working for Moscow since at least 1985 and in the process betraying at least 10 foreign agents working for the United States, officials said. There may be no connection whatsoever, but the possibility must be explored.

The detective work includes a re-examination of the killing last August of Fred Woodruff, a C.I.A. officer shot to death in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in what Georgian officials have said was a random robbery attempt. Mr. Ames, Government officials said, traveled to Georgia on assignment in July.

The agency has also begun a painstaking investigation in the agency's Counternarcotics Center, where Mr. Ames last worked. His duties, occasionally conducted in liaison with Russian intelligence officers, involved tracking the flow of heroin and cocaine through Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. He also traveled regularly to Colombia, the world capital of cocaine.

That task, Government officials said, accounts for only a small fraction of the internal investigations. Inside the C.I.A, they said, hundreds of analysts and officers are weighing the importance of every shred of information that Mr. Ames learned and could have sold to Moscow over the last decade, scheduling interviews with every intelligence and drug-enforcement officer he ever met and reviewing the dozens of trips he took abroad since his first overseas posting in 1969.

In time, they must document every aspect of his 32 years at the agency. 'Reconstruct Ames's Career'

"You have to reconstruct Ames's career," said David Holliday, a senior staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1985 to 1991. "You have to look at jobs he held, everybody he talked to, everybody he had dealings with. What information did he have access to? What could he have gotten that he didn't have access to? You have to assume wherever he was stationed abroad, wherever his office was at the agency, that he had the potential to put his hands on anything. It's a man-killer.

"The problem is that everybody's covering their hindquarters, and trying to do a true damage assessment ends up being difficult. There are careers at stake."

The careers threatened by the case include those of the agency's top clandestine officers and counterintelligence officials, who may have known of suspicions about Mr. Ames as early as 1989, and the chiefs of the agency's Office of Security, which was responsible for administering background checks that might have exposed Mr. Ames years earlier. They failed to see that Mr. Ames was living far beyond his means and putting in the bank hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, all of it coming, investigators now say, from the largesse of Soviet intelligence.

One intelligence official close to the investigation said the C.I.A.'s greatest worries concern the true loyalties of agents recruited from Russia and Eastern Europe. "The biggest question is: How much confidence do they have in some of the people they're running right now?" he said. "How do they know they're not doubled?" Re-evaluation and Rethinking

A retired C.I.A. officer long responsible for covert operations agreed. "This guy Ames presumably would have known about all but the most sensitive of our agents," he said.

More difficult and potentially devastating work is afoot, Government officials said. The agency must re-evaluate what it knows about intelligence operations against the Soviet Union that failed inexplicably and reconsider controversial intelligence imbroglios from the last decade.

Consider the case of Mr. Yurchenko, the deputy chief of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States, who appeared to have defected to Washington in August 1985 but suddenly returned to Moscow three months later. Mr. Ames's work as a spy for Moscow had begun by then, Government officials said, and he was said to be among the handful of C.I.A. officers who handled Mr. Yurchenko's debriefings.

It is known that Mr. Yurchenko revealed in those debriefings that another C.I.A. officer, Edward Lee Howard, was working for the Soviet Union. Mr. Howard, had been trained for a C.I.A. posting in Moscow, fled the United States before he could be arrested.

Was Mr. Yurchenko sent to befuddle the C.I.A.? Was his tip genuine? Or was it aimed at drawing attention away from Mr. Ames? Did it allow the Soviets to arrest double agents working for the United States without implicating Mr. Ames? Did anything pass between the two men during Mr. Yurchenko's debriefings?

Questions similar to these, dealing with the true nature of defectors and the false footings of disinformation, have in the past tied the C.I.A. in knots and driven experienced intelligence officers to drink and distraction, former C.I.A. officials say.

There are secrets and then there are mysteries, Robert M. Gates, the former Director of Central Intelligence, once noted. Secrets may be unraveled. Mysteries may never be.

"Ultimately," said one intelligence official, "unless Ames will talk, you'll never know."
_________________________________________________________________________________

A former member of a Colombian drug cartel testified today at a Senate hearing that Haiti's powerful police commander, Lieut. Col. Joseph Michel Francois, collaborated in shipping tons of cocaine to the United States during the 1980's.

American drug enforcement officials and supporters of Haiti's exiled President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, have long asserted that members of the military regime that overthrew him in 1991 are involved in the cocaine trade. But the testimony today from Gabriel Taboada, a convicted cocaine smuggler, is believed to be the first sworn public statement by a drug trafficker that a senior member of the current regime has conspired to ship cocaine.

Speaking through an interpreter, Mr. Taboada said he had met with senior members of the Haitian military, including Colonel Francois, in the offices of the Medellin cocaine cartel in the Colombian town of the same name in 1984. He said the Haitian officers helped insure that roughly 70,000 pounds of cocaine were delivered from Colombia through Haiti to the United States in 1987.

"The cartel used Haiti as a bridge so as to later move the drugs toward the United States," Mr. Taboada said. "They took planes out of Colombia and landed in Haiti, protected by the Haitian military. Michel Francois protected the drugs in Haiti and then allowed the drugs to continue to the United States."

Mr. Taboada appeared before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that held two days of hearings on the corruption of governments by criminal syndicates.

After the fall of the Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986, Haiti was ruled for five years by a series of military strongmen. Among them was Lieut. Gen. Prosper Avril, who governed from 1988 to 1990 and whom Mr. Taboada also identified today as a participant in the Colombian cocaine trade.

Father Aristide took office in February 1991 after winning the country's first democratic election. He was overthrown seven months later by a group of military officers including Lieut. Gen. Raoul Cedras and Colonel Francois, who are said by human rights groups to rule through terror and intimidation.

Mr. Taboada did not testify on what role the Haitian military is playing in the drug trade today, since he has been in Federal prison since 1989 serving a 12-year sentence for cocaine trafficking. He has testified for the Government in several cases, including the prosecution culminating in the 1992 conviction of the former Panamanian leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega, on drug trafficking charges.

Mr. Taboada also said he had bribed officials of the United States Embassy and other foreign diplomats in Colombia during the 1980's to use their diplomatic status to help him import luxury automobiles for members of the cartel. Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said he had raised the issue with the F.B.I. but had been told that there were "jurisdictional problems" in investigating the charge. A call to a State Department spokeswoman was not returned today.

The hearing was convened by Senator Kerry, who heads the Foreign Relations subcommitee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations. On Wednesday, the panel heard testimony from the Director of Central Intelligence, R. James Woolsey, that international criminal gangs had undermined the political and economic stabilility of Russia, bought the allegiances of Latin American leaders and saturated the United States with cocaine and heroin.

Combining public information with corroborative intelligence gathered recently by the C.I.A., the State Department and other Government agencies, Mr. Woolsey and Senator Kerry described organizations grown rich from the sale of drugs and weapons infiltrating governments, influencing legislation and investing in United States banks and legitimate businesses.
_________________________________________________________________________________

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, May 24—Large gaps in a worldwide embargo that took effect on Sunday have allowed some of Haiti's wealthiest families, traditionally close allies of the defiant military, to continue a lucrative food trade, diplomats and Haitian business people say.

The situation resulted from a failure by the United States to freeze the assets of leading Haitian business executives and to keep them out of the food trade, and critics of American policy expressed doubts about Washington's willingness to end the political crisis. The freezing of assets is only being applied to Haiti's senior military officers and their allies in Government.

The decision to permit the wealthiest Haitian families to maintain their near-monopolies in basic foods, which are exempt from the embargo, was described by one diplomat as a "judgment call" based on a concern that punishing the economic elite would merely drive it closer to the army.

Critics say, on the other hand, that these families are already close to the army and that pressures must be applied to them for the sanctions to be effective. Most of Haiti's wealthiest traders have opposed the exiled President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and collaborated with the military leaders who overthrew him.

Ex-Friends of the U.S.

Diplomatic and business critics also say there has been a hesitancy to pursue Haitian officers for what Administration officials have asserted is their role in lucrative cocaine trafficking. This, the critics said, has reinforced the view that longstanding allies of the United States who now oppose Father Aristide are being shielded from punishment.

A former Haitian official angered by Washington's policy said powerful Haitians had "inside information and connections in Washington that tell them that Aristide is never coming back," and added: "This failure to act decisively only reinforces that view here."

An American diplomat conceded that the failure to move against the country's richest families had left "a perception out there of us sending mixed messages."

But the United States Ambassador, William L. Swing, defended the policies and said today in an interview, "Whatever the perception may be, I believe that the Clinton Administration is absolutely serious about bringing back President Aristide to finish his mandate."

To accomplish this, Mr. Swing said Washington would "actively pursue every avenue," including possibly freezing the asserts of the powerful Haitian families or "going after the military for things like narcotics."

The Big Three

The worldwide embargo, imposed by United Nations, bans trade with Haiti in all goods except medicines and basic foods.

In an executive order, the Clinton Administration said it would allow trade in these goods by people who are not members of the Haitian military or the army-backed provisional government.

A half dozen or so families -- the best known are the Brandts, the Acras and the Mevses -- have long dominated the economy, in large part through control of the food trade. Their influence has been reinforced by personal ties forged with generations of American diplomats and by their use of well-connected lobbyists in Washington.

Opponents Profit

By allowing this elite to continue to trade in cooking oil, flour, rice and sugar, these families stand to make a lot of money, even as they oppose American policy.

In what is widely considered one of the most flagrant examples, the Mevs family has reportedly been building a huge oil depot here to help the army defy the embargo.

"Right in the middle of the embargo, you have a guy who is described by the Americans as a friend getting a contract like this," said one Haitian businessman. "The joke is that these people are being allowed to profit grotesquely from the sanctions."

The businessman said the depot was being built with the help of commercial financing from the United States, but this could not be confirmed.

Washington's hesitancy in taking firm action against the business elite and the army is a result of a long history of close ties and perceived common interests.

"Countries always look for local allies in their foreign policy and protect them no matter what," said one diplomat. "Unfortunately, in the case of Haiti, the United States' old friends are precisely the people responsible for this crisis."

A History of Coziness

There is a less charitable explanation: that both the Pentagon and the intelligence community in Washington fear a spate of embarrassing revelations made by Haitians in reprisal for a crackdown.

Many Haitians suggest that Justice Department proceedings against army leaders involved in the drug trade have been stalled by fears that such a pursuit would produce a public washing of dirty laundry. Many of Haiti's top military officials received their military and intelligence training in the United States.

"The history of connections of these people in Washington gives them the ability to play with opinion here," said one former Haitian official. "All they have been doing lately is saying that Washington is not in a hurry for Aristide to come back, and even for those who don't want to believe it, each twist of the events seems to confirm their wisdom."

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, June 7—Haiti's military leaders have been working with Colombian traffickers for the past four years to help move hundreds of pounds of cocaine each month from South and Central America to the United States, American diplomats and other officials say.

In their first detailed account of the role of the Haitian armed forces in international narcotics traffic, American officials said that much of Haiti's military leadership, including its commander, Lieut. Gen. Raoul Cedras, either has been actively involved with Colombian drug dealers or has turned a blind eye to their trafficking in cocaine, accepting payments for their cooperation.

For months, United States officials have discounted reports of drug trafficking by senior Haitian officers, and some see the sudden turnabout as an attempt to lay the groundwork for a possible invasion to restore the exiled Haitian President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The American officials are now saying that the Haitian officers are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars each month for allowing their country to be used as a transshipment center by the main Colombian drug rings in Cali and Medellin.

Haitian Military Informers

The officials who discussed the role of Haitian Army leaders said that their information had been developed in recent months in large part thanks to cooperation from members of the Haitian military itself.

"These sources have been very specific about the dates, the sources and the quantities of narcotics involved, and we have this first hand now," said one American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Asked if the evidence against Haiti's military was sufficiently strong to take legal action against them, the official said, "We are pretty close."

The disclosure of the investigation comes three weeks after President Clinton cited Haiti's involvement in the narcotics trade as one of the national security concerns that had convinced him that international military action might be required in Haiti.

In recent days, as speculation has grown about a possible United States-led military action to oust the country's military leaders, members of the Haitian high command have begun consultations here with lawyers who represented Manuel Antonio Noriega, the former Panamanian leader who is serving a 40-year sentence in a Federal penitentiary.

General Noriega, who was accused by the United States of involvement in international narcotics trafficking and money laundering, was captured in an American military intervention in 1989 and brought to the United States for trial.

Generals 'R' Us

Two of General Noriega's lawyers, Frank Rubino and John May, acknowledged today that they had recently been in Haiti for talks with the military. Refusing to discuss further any details of their involvement here, Mr. May, who was contacted by telephone in Miami, said, "Generals are our business."

Haitian military officials have denied any involvement in the narcotics traffic. Following a recent cocaine seizure, Col. Antoine Atouriste, the officer in charge of Haiti's antidrug force, said that reports about the drug-running role of the Haitian military were part of an international campaign to destroy it.

Father Aristide has long asserted that his country's army had been kept in power by narcotics profits.

Congressmen Skeptical

Members of Congress who are opposed to the use of American force to reinstate Father Aristide say that they are skeptical of the case being put together against Haiti's military leaders and say they suspect political motives lie behind the charges.

"There is less true concern over the narcotics problem than there is to lay a foundation for some kind of military action in Haiti," said Robert Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey, who heads the House Foreign Relations subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs. "There is a problem with narcotics in Haiti, but it is no larger than any number of other places."

Officials who discussed details of the Haitian military's role in cocaine trafficking said that until the recent embargo was placed on the country, cocaine was regularly air-dropped into Haiti or delivered by ships from Panama and Colombia.

The role of the Haitian military, the officials said, was to provide protected landing strips and ports, assuring that the unloading of the cocaine was undisturbed.

"Then it is taken to other locations by waiting vehicles, distributed to other points around the country and held until it can be shipped onwards in loads of 50 to 100 kilograms," an official said.

Because of the international embargo against Haiti, officials said they believed the country had an unusually large stockpile of cocaine on hand, which it was unable to export.

The suspect, Vicente Rivera Ramos, is the son of the Cali cartel leader, Vicente Rivera Gonzalez. The shootout occurred near Guarai, a town 600 miles north of Brasilia where the police captured 8.36 tons of cocaine on Sunday. No one was hurt in the shootout.
________________________________________________________________________________

WASHINGTON, July 14— While insisting again that a United States invasion of Haiti is not imminent, the Clinton Administration continued today to lay the groundwork for such an action.

Elite Army paratroopers who would probably lead an invasion of Haiti stepped up night training exercises at Fort Bragg, N.C. The Administration announced that 15 countries had signaled a willingness to join a multinational force that would maintain order and retrain Haiti's security forces after the current military government leaves.

The exiled Haitian President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, also issued a statement today calling for "swift and definitive" action by the international community to oust Haiti's leaders.

In making known recent military exercises but insisting no invasion is imminent, the Administration seemed to be pressing the Haitian military leaders to leave and also trying to silence critics in Congress who say that the White House is moving precipitately to use force.

A day after the Administration's senior foreign policy advisers briefed Congressional leaders on Haiti policy, Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who is an influential voice on military matters, warned the White House to consider any invasion plans "very carefully," and said Haiti is not a "vital" American interest.

At the same time, the Senate today rejected, by a vote of 57 to 42, a proposal by the Senate Republican leader, Bob Dole, to head off military action by creating a bipartisan commission to study the Haitian crisis, which opponents said would tie President Clinton's hands for months.

The Administration's actions were seen by many in Washington as a final effort to persuade Haiti's military leaders to leave voluntarily so the United States would not have to send troops, a step President Clinton has said he wants to avoid but will not rule out.

The White House continued to insist that it would still rely on strict economic sanctions to drive out Haiti's military leaders. But even as it maintained that position, some 2,000 paratroopers from the elite 82d Airborne Division, which would be in the vanguard of an American military action, held one of the largest rehearsals of an air assault that the unit has had in two years, Army officials said.

The paratroopers are practicing jumping from C-141 and C-130 transport planes, and securing landing zones for troops and equipment that would be flown in later -- the same task the troops would undertake in an invasion of Haiti.

Military officials in Washington and at Fort Bragg, where the 82d Airborne is based, described the two-night exercise as routine training that had been scheduled for two months.

"Honest to goodness, this isn't related to Haiti or any specific scenario," said Maj. Jim Hinnant, a spokesman for the 82d Airborne.

But one Pentagon-based general said that field commanders are now using long-scheduled exercises "to focus on things we need to get down if we invade Haiti."

Marines Stage Evacuation

In addition, more than 4,000 marines staged a mock evacuation for the second day on Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas, about 80 miles northwest of Haiti. They are part of a force of some 2,860 marines posted on Navy ships near Haiti.

"We don't want to comment on the direct purpose of any training that would be going on," the Pentagon spokeswoman, Kathleen deLaski, said. "Some of the things you see going on are related to training that could be used to execute a military option."

Tensions in Haiti and in Washington have risen following the departure from Haiti on Wednesday of 89 international human rights observers who were declared unwelcome by Haiti's military rulers and given 48 hours to leave the country.

In light of these tensions and reports of the military preparations, Father Aristide's statement, while similar to others he has made in the past, seemed to add to expectations of an invasion. The latest comments seemed to contradict those made in an interview with National Public Radio in June, when he had said, "Never, never, never would I agree to be restored to power by an invasion."

15 Nations to Help

The White House said that as many as 15 nations have signaled that they would participate in a multinational force to maintain security in Haiti after the military leaders leave. But the United Nations must still negotiate with those countries to work out specific details of their involvement.

The chief United States delegate to the United Nations, Madeleine K. Albright, said at a luncheon speech here that countries indicating a willingness to join a post-restoration force include Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Surinam, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. Ms. Albright said the countries have tentatively committed 2,000 to 4,000 police and trainers.

"They would be there to help with the training of the military and police force, to watch the situation on the ground and to be on hand to make sure that there isn't some upsurge in violence," said the White House spokeswoman, Dee Dee Myers.

Administration officials also said today that Surinam has agreed to join Dominica, Grenada and Antigua in offering safe haven to Haitians fleeing their homeland. Surinam said it could accommodate between 2,000 and 2,500 Haitians.

Broadcasts to Haiti

The State Department announced today that broadcasts, called Radio Democracy, will begin on Friday and will be scheduled for two hours a day -- from 6:30 P.M. to 7:30 P.M., then again from 8 P.M. to 9 P.M. -- on AM 1035 and FM 91.9.

Broadcasts will include messages of reconciliation from Father Aristide and other Haitians, but they will not include appeals for Haitians to halt their attempts to flee in rickety boats, a condition Father Aristide refused to accept.

Administration officials cited what they called encouraging signs that the number of Haitians trying to flee by boat may be dropping.

The State Department spokesman, Michael McCurry, said that about 2,300, or 30 percent, of the 7,600 Haitians being processed at Guantanamo Bay have chosen to return home. The remainder will be sent to third countries until the Haitian military government is replaced.

Warnings From Nunn

Administration officials said the apparent reduction in the number of Haitians fleeing by boat has given the White House some "breathing space" to decide its next steps. But Congressional officials cautioned Mr. Clinton and his advisers not to act rashly.

"When we're thinking of Haiti, we also have to think of other spots in the world where we have potential problems," Senator Nunn said on NBC's "Today" Show. "Korea is a place where we have a vital interest, and that has to be our first top priority. Bosnia is also important and Haiti is important, but neither Bosnia nor Haiti are vital."

Senator Nunn said that calculation would change quickly if Americans come under attack in Haiti. "Right now, they're not under threat," Mr. Nunn said. "If they come under threat, we have to be prepared to move very rapidly."

Ms. Myers said there were no known threats against the more than 4,000 Americans in Haiti, but she added, "The situation is deteriorating, and I think that makes things more difficult for everyone there."

Chart: "TALLY: Forces Near Haiti" shows numbers of U.S. military ships, helicopters and troops in the vicinity of Haiti. (Source: Reuters) (pg. A6)

Correction: July 16, 1994, Saturday An article yesterday about American military planning for a possible invasion of Haiti misstated the number of marines staging a mock evacuation on an island in the Bahamas. It was more than 400, not more than 4,000.
_________________________________________________________________________________

Re "U.S. Making Moves for Haiti Action" (front page, July 15): When Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned against the use of military force to restore democracy in Haiti, he joined a long list of prominent apologists for Haiti's military rulers.

A few weeks ago, you quoted Representative Robert G. Torricelli, chairman of the House Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, as downplaying the very significant role of Haiti's military in the illegal drug trade ("U.S. Says Haiti's Military Runs Cocaine," news article, June 8).

It should now be apparent that our foreign policy in Haiti is driven by fears that the seamier side of United States intelligence will be exposed to the American public. As you reported May 25 in "Despite Embargo, Haiti's Rich Seem to Get Richer," "both the Pentagon and the intelligence community in Washington fear a spate of embarrassing revelations made by Haitians in reprisal for a crackdown" against Haiti's military regime.

The same article reported speculation that Justice Department drug charges against Haitian army leaders "have been stalled by fears that such a pursuit would produce a public washing of dirty laundry" that could implicate the same United States military and intelligence agencies that trained Haiti's top military officials.

Last November, you reported that the Central Intelligence Agency had created an intelligence organization in Haiti that has "evolved into an instrument of political terror" for Haitian officers "engaged in drug trafficking" ("C.I.A. Formed Haitian Unit Later Tied to Narcotics Trade," news article, Nov. 14, 1993).

Since then, the C.I.A. has spent more time publicizing its distorted "psychological profile" of Haiti's first democratically elected President, the exiled Jean-Bertrand Aristide, than in disclosing the corrupt activities of its own ruthless military allies in Haiti ("Key Haiti Leaders Said to Have Been in the C.I.A.'s Pay," news article, Nov. 1, 1993).

The fear that United States complicity in Haiti's political corruption and terror could become more widely recognized and exposed may explain why so many of our political leaders continue to oppose the use of any multinational force to topple Haiti's dictators.

KENNETH B. WRIGHT

New York, July 15, 1994
________________________________________________________________________________